The Lost Days of Silas
by Fidelity Darkling
Summary: Can the boy who becomes Silas keep his sanity while living on the streets of Marseilles? Can he keep his life? Read the untold story of Silas's days living on the street as a thief with murder on his hands and his leap into manhood. Some foreign profanity
1. The Apple

The Lost Days of Silas

A small stolen apple rested on the far side of a darkened Factory basement in Marseilles, laying silently where the boy had thrown it a few minutes ago, a dark purple bruise scarring its red-gold flesh, like the boy's heart felt now. The tears streaming down his face washed tiny streaks in his grimy face, revealing the bleached skin beneath the dirt and grim, like white scars. But the boy had no mirror to see this, nor was he watching the apple. He had his eyes closed to the horrific world that he had entered, seeing nothing but the insides of his eyelids. Darkness.

Flashes of light swept over his eyelids, the cars passing by the small hole that the boy had climbed into to get to his new home. With each flash came another image, the same two. Mother on the ground. Father with the knife in his back. Mother with the bruises. Father with the blood. Mother. Father. Each dead. Gone. Forever. And it was all his fault. All his fault. Mother! His eyes flew open to reveal his eyes. Blood-red eyes. Demon eyes.

He looked up with a questioning glance at the sky through the hole in the wall. There was no moon tonight, only the light of the passing cars. _How could there be a God? How could He make me suffer so much? He made me this way, how I was born… He made my father drink so much and kill my mom. He made me a killer! He did it!!_

"HE DID IT!!" he screamed aloud, not caring who heard. He ran to the other side of the room, picked up the apple and threw it with all his might to the place he had just been sitting as if to hurt the ghost that had been sitting there not two seconds before. Seeing the apple bounce off the wall, not hitting anything before it, he knelt and slammed his fists into the stone floor, pain shot up his arms and into his shoulders, the boy let out a cry of agony and let the tears flow again. The apple rolled over on its side to reveal a new bruise, this one more deep, more dark purple. White juice seeped through a small crack in the bruise.

The storm had ended. The ghost was gone.


	2. The Pebble

The boy's hands lay on the ground, they looked loosely attached to the ends of his arms, like dead mice, lifeless and bony. He knelt there for a few seconds as his heart slowed to its regular beat, letting the tears roll from his cheeks onto the ground with small plops. He listened to his heart beat in his chest. It beat in time to the tears falling to the ground, but quieter. It was a faint heartbeat. Not even a butterfly's heartbeat could be as soft, as fragile. He watched and listened as his heart pattered and his tears plopped to the ground. They formed a small crystal pool that then got too big to stay in one place and flowed between the cracks in the grey stone that made the floor of the boy's home.

The boy watched as the tear river flowed away from him, and eventually stopped as his tear ducts ran dry and the pool of shining liquid was gone. Then he realized the blood on the stone floor.

It was a small pool of blood, about the size of one euro, gently resting under his left hand. He lifted up his hand to his face to see a small pebble embedded in the skin of the soft part of his hand. He didn't feel any pain, but there was blood. But not too much, the pebble was only superficially wedged in his hand.

With his other hand, the boy touched the stone and shuddered as a small wave of pain shot up his arm. He quietly touched the stone again and waited for the wave to pass. He then grabbed the stone as gently as he could, and started to pull.

The pebble didn't come out quickly, nor slowly, but it eventually came out, leaving a small indentation in his hand from which a small but steady stream of red blood came and the memory of the pain. The young boy quickly forgot the pain and bandaged his wound with a shroud of cloth he tore from his tattered clothes. He sat back against the wall and watched the apple lay still on the ground.


	3. The Food

hey i know that im a bit overdue for this chapter... ok, maybe a couple months late, but here it is :)

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He stood, staring at the food on the table. It was abandoned. Heaps of salad, steak, and mashed potatoes spilling joyfully over the sides of the plate, left behind by two greedy well-fedgodd-for-nothing women.

An entire glass of water—an entire glass! —sat next to the plate on the table covered with a pure white table cloth. And coffee too.

Steaming, wafting its delicious caffeine-rich smell into his nostrils. There was no one around to see the strands of saliva that trickled thickly from the corners of the Boy's mouth.

His stomach was completely empty, not even a crum of his last meal remained. All of the street-side vendors had shooed him away whenever they saw him. They now knew his face, the albino orphan begger. And he was unable to steal even a pie left to cool in the baker's open window.

His stomach gave a feeble growl. He needed food.

He needed it now.

The waiters from the corner restaurant hadn't noticed that the two women had left the table yet and every one else in the restaurant was too busy eating and chatting away their happy lives to notice the starving albino outside _Le Bordeaux _restaurant. Standing and salivating.

The skinny street was completely deserted except for the occasional beggar or homeless person. And the less-than-occasional stick shift taxi cab. So nobody noticed The Boy as he slithered up to the patio table and stuffed the contents of both the plated into the woven breadbasket, chugged the icy water, and downed the tiny espresso.

Just as the warm caffeine-enriched elixir slid down his throat, he heard a man's voice shout at him. The voice was speaking French and was slightly muffled from behind the glass of the restaurant, but the meaning was clear.

"_Hé! Vous! Part de là! Tombe la nourriture!" Hey! You! Get out of here! Drop the food!_

The boy did not drop the food that was now clutched to his chest in the small basket, but he did take the former advice and ran away from the patio as fast as his legs could carry him. And with the espresso now in his stomach, it was quite fast.

The restaurant waiter that had yelled at the Boy did not give chase, _it's just another beggar, after all_, he thought to himself, _and that food would have gone to waste anyway._

The Boy did not stop until he reached the end of the street and darted into an alleyway close to his home warehouse. There he wolfed down the delicious, juicy steak, the mashed potatoes, salad, and two of the three pieces of bread.

_Those women must have been American, _he thought, _no other Frenchwoman would have ordered such a meal._

He did not give much more thought to this matter, and turned his thoughts back to eating.

When he was finished, he patted his overfull stomach and sighed gleefully with the wonderful feeling of digestion. He could barely move from this relieved feeling.

When the weight in his stomach loosened slightly and he was able to walk, he grabbed his one piece of bread, which he was too full to eat, and hobbled over to the warehouse basement, feeling revived and reborn.

He slunk into his corner of the warehouse basement, where he had fashioned a bed out of old flour and rice sacks, and silently fell asleep.

Then his entire world blew up in his face.

Literally.


	4. The Explosion

The first thing that the Boy remembered was a bright white light, a rushing sound, and a steady flow of heat onto his face.

It was all very sudden, like a flash of lightning, and was just as loud.

He didn't remember reacting to the burst of flames that rushed towards his face, nor the onslaught of crushing weight of cement, nor did he feel the hurt of the burning, but the next thing her knew, he was looking up at a surprisingly white ceiling and watching lights inlaid into it rush by at a suprising speed. His head felt light and spinny.

_Hehe, _he though, _pretty lights._

The beautiful squares of radiance suddenly gave way to numerous white tiles.

He began to count them: _one two tree fish green… _

The Boy could hear many urgent voices all around him and he also felt a dull, throbbing pain all over his body, but he didn't want to pay attention to either. He just wanted to count the pretty white tiles. He continued to count the tiles: _sugar shvixteen Eva book fourty…_

The Boy suddenly felt a slow pressure on his right inside arm and got very tired and. He lost track counting the tiles at _fifteen gajillion and mustard-y two. _His eyes shut, and he watched the array of colors from behind his eyelids

The Boy heard a loud, continuous beep and then everything when black.

***

_He was floating atop a cushiony cloud, floating through an oasis of beautiful stars. He could see the sun… he was next to the sun. But this was not the sun that he knew. This was a bright light, but not so bright that it hurt his eyes, it just seemed to pass through him and his eyes. He was less than a few inches from it. He could reach out and take it in his hands if he wanted to. He reached out towards it, the very bright light. As his hand got closer to it, The Boy could feel a dull throb of warmth… and life. As if this Sun was… _alive_ in some way. His hand got closer, he had no fear for his life, and the warm light seemed so inviting. Just as his hand was about to make contact with the little ball of beautiful light, a great streak of lightning streaked across the sky, its source undetectable, and hit him flat on the chest, jerking his hand back from the bright light, and throwing him back… _onto the flat and uncomfortable operation gurney that he was laying on. He heard a rhythmic beeping dimly and a voice say faintly in the background, "nous avons un pouls!" _We have a pulse! _

The Boy lay there, listening to the beeping, but he didn't open his eyes or move. He was very tired. He was very hungry. His entire body stung and shooting pain emitted from his head and right leg and his chest hurt when he breathed.

He couldn't help it, he was tired. So he slept.

***

The Boy spent the next month and a half in _Hôpital Henri Gastaut_ recovering from broken ribs, legs, a concussion, ruptured spleen, and a few 1st and 2nd degree burns.

Apparently the factory he had been living under had a broken gas main that no one knew about. The factory was in very poor repair and it constantly flooded. The gas leaked out of the pipe and spilled all over the floor. One absent-minded janitor and one dim-witted cigarette toss later, the janitor was dead and the explosion blew a hole in the floor of the Factory, under which the Boy had been sleeping.

The Boy had been fortunate with the cement ceiling of his abode: the cement that fell on top of him shielded him from most of the fire.

The doctors had told him this and then promptly asked where his parents were and who he was.

The Boy looked at the doctor from under his head bandage and just stared at him, saying nothing. He didn't move his eyes from the doctor until the doctor got uncomfortable and left, mumbling something about the Boy's concussion.

Three days after that, a nurse came in to give The Boy his pills and she asked him the same question. He didn't say anything.

He stayed like that… and he didn't speak to anyone… he just sat and ate and recovered.


	5. The Girl

_**Hey Fidel here. Yeah it's a short chapter, but it kinda doesn't fit with the last one or the next one, so this is gonna be Chapter 4-1/2, Bueno? Alrighty-o let's get this party started!**_

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Every other day spent in the hospital was torture. When he could walk again, the doctors placed him in the children's ward, hoping that the other children's presence would loosen his tongue.

Of course it didn't. All it did was bring him to the attention of a lonely-looking girl. She was around the age of ten and when he entered, she looked at him with a funny sideward gaze, sure, pick out the albino in the crowd, why don't we? He thought. Her face showed signs of scarring and rot remnants. She had a bandage on her head that was slightly hidden by a growth of wavy black hair. She had eyes to match. The Boy tried to ward off her curious gaze with his own deadly stare, but she stared right back, unflinching. He had eventually given up and turned back to his puzzle—a farmer and his cow and hen with a blood-red barnyard in the background—but he felt the red-hot gaze boring into the top of his skull.

He had to beg the nurses to not send him back to the playroom the next day.


	6. The Escape pt 1

The Boy knew it would come one day.

He knew that he had recovered completely. They had moved him to the lesser care ward and had begun to take of his casts and put him through physical therapy. They called him _le __fantôme__, _he had survived an entire explosion and collapsing of a building with minimal wounds. He had barely even needed the skin grafts. It was a miracle, but not something that God would do, he heard them say, nothing but a ghost and bad news. Have you seen his eyes? Like a demon's, they would whisper. The Boy didn't care. He knew that he could walk out of the hospital any time he wanted. So that was what he planned to do.

They refused to let him out of the hospital until he told them who he was. He knew that would only end him in an orphanage… and eventually with—he shuddered at the thought—_parents._

If he hadn't been able to keep the ones that he had had, then what was the point of getting some other ones.

Besides, who would want an albino child?

Each day, after the Direction Generale des Impots representative left the room, he would plan. Every day he walked through the halls of the hospital, he would measure air vents and hallways in his mind. Each day he had to be cooped up in his room, he would organize. Each meal, he would stash a new food item into his hiding place. Each new sponge bath was a waste of time, as he would do his best to grunge himself up for the walk back into the streets. And every corner of _Hôpital Henri Gastaut _was now stored safely in the mental map that the Boy had created.

***

And tonight was the night.

The boy lay in bed, waiting for the last orderly to pass by the door to his room and counted the seconds. The man's slow footsteps echoed and died out as he did.

5… 4… 3… 2… 1… lights…

The lights went out with an electric click, a door slammed far away, and then all was quiet.

The Boy was still, waiting to make sure that the orderly didn't come back.

After an hour of pure silence passed, the boy slipped out of his bed and put his bare feet onto the icy floor. He shivered in his paper-thin hospital robe. Then he stuffed every scrap of blanket he could get his hands on into his pillowcase and then emptied another pillowcase and stuffed that one with food he had been secretly stashing for the past week. When he was done with that, he slithered up to the door and peered out the long rectangular window. Through the crisscrossing black wires, he could see nothing but an empty dark hospital hallway, stretching out infinitely in either direction of his peripheral vision. He gripped the sterile cloth of the pillowcase and switched one of the packages to the other hand.

Slowly, he reached for the metal doorknob that always reminded him of a horse head, all without taking his eyes off of the dark hallway, and tried to turn it. The door was locked.

_Merde._

The boy looked back into the room, mind racing, and spotted an unused IV needle, then he found a power cord. He grabbed the needle and stripped the plastic off of the cord after taking it out of the socket.

_Perfect._

It only took him a few minutes, but The Boy was now outside the tiny room, pillowcase in each hand.

_Clothes._

The coat check was just down the hall and it was always left locked, but The Boy didn't need much time to crack that lock either.

Now fully clothed and with other new clothing in his new backpack, The Boy silently set out again into the dark of the hallway.

He had everything he needed, and now all he needed to do was to get out.

***

Sneaking was the Boy's specialty, and so was thievery as well as lock picking. All of these specialties really come in handy when escaping from a prison-like hospital. He snickered, braving the fact that nobody was in this empty part of the children's ward. And even if there were, they would all be fast asleep by now.

He absent-mindedly picked the lock to the next door in the hallway, aiming for the air vent in the next hallway, where he would climb into and take 2 rights, one left, pass three other lefts and rights, and then exit down onto the emergency dock were all the ambulances were parked. If there was one already there, he would have to wait until all doctors were inside, but if there were more still, he would have to…

His thoughts stopped abruptly and he froze, mid-pick.

There had been a noise.

Like a deer caught in headlights, the boy tried to move, his brain screaming at his muscles to turn and run, but instead all of the muscles in his body had gone rigid. He was caught, half-crouch, hands still on the makeshift lock pick.

Not even his head would turn to look at the source of the noise. A flashlight suddenly came to life behind him, his heard thudded in his chest. Kah-thump Kah-thump! MOVE!!!! MOVE!!

The light made a slow pass around its source and froze on him. There was a barely audible—but deliberate—step toward him. The circle of light around him got bigger; his shadow became more defined.

Kah-thump KAH-Thump KAH-THUMP!!

_MERDE!!!!!_

The Boy suddenly regained motor ability and flung himself around and at the light-bearer at the same time, all the while stage-whispering a slight war-cry.

"GAH!!!"

"EEEK!!!!"

The Boy knocked his body into the light-bearer's and the flashlight skewed into the depths of one of the hallways and went out. The boy had his hands around the soft flesh of a neck. A child's neck.

The scream hadn't come from a young boy, either.

The Boy looked, actually looked at his light-bearer now. He squinted, his eyes still unadjusted to the dark after the flashlight had blinded him. Then he saw the bluish-black hair and the old scars that were barely visible in the light. And the piercing gaze, although tinted with fear now, that still disturbed his mind.

The Boy loosened his hands slightly.  
It was the girl from the playroom.


	7. The Escape pt 2

**Yeah I know that I had a slightly different chapter here earlier, but it just seemed that Silas got too out of character, so i revised it. Here it is!**

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The Boy tried to release his hands completely from the girl's neck, but something in his mind told him not to, as if he were holding the head of a snake to keep it from biting himself, trying to keep it alive, but protecting himself as well.

The girl was staring at him with phantom eyes, he tried to match their power. To no avail.

Her eyes were almost hateful. But they were somehow curious, giving her a strange tortured look. The most laser-pointed stare a person could give another. She remained quiet. The Boy let his hands twitch slightly around her neck, and in response, she tried to fight off the hands, but she just was too weak, she wasn't going to hurt him, he decided. She stopped trying when she found resistance futile.

She let a tear fall out of her eye, though not letting an inch of her stare twitch out of line.

The Boy let go of the girl's neck, partly to have pity on her, partly to get away from her evil stare. Then he backed up a few paces to look at her properly. She kept her eyes warily on him.

She was surprisingly easy to see now that the Boy had gotten his sight back and the spot on his vision had gone: she was still in her hospital gown which was disarrayed slightly from the small attack, and had no shoes on. Her hair was thrown about in a reckless fashion, as if she had just woken up, which she might just as well had, giving her a crazed look paired with the eyes. Her face had healed slightly from the last time he had seen her, with the exception of the white scar that ran down the left side of her face, showing plainly in the moonlight against her olive complexion. Her lips were set in a pout that plainly showed her age, a startling contradiction to the rest of her posture and eye expression.

The Boy's foot hit a metal object as he took an unconscious step back. Looking down, he found the flashlight, he picked it up and held it out to the girl.

She shook her head.

He took a step forward and shook the flashlight in her face.

She shook her head again.

The Boy looked at the light. It was heavy and black and what looked like enough battery power to last through the rest of the year, he turned and put it in his backpack.

The girl did nothing.

The Boy sighed. It felt like a conversation between walls. Creepy, staring-back kind of walls.

He still needed to pick the lock. Looking over his shoulder one more time he saw that the girl was still there, a few feet closer. He turned back to her. Her eyes flashed not to the flashlight, like he had expected, but to the lock pick on the door.

The girl paused long and hard. The Boy turned back to his work, he needed to work fast, just in case. The lock clicked and clanked and eventually the Boy felt the presence of the girl behind him. The lock clanked open.

The Boy opened the door to a slightly colder hallway with the slightly unhinged air vent and picked up his backpack. Without looking back, he started off.

He got five paces into the hallway and heard a voice behind him. A small, swishing voice like wind through grass, but somehow strong and rough like a boulder had given birth to it.

"Can I come with you?" The girl asked.

The Boy stopped and turned around. The small figure stood in the hallway. Her look of hatred had wiped off her face completely, showing a huge look of craving, like a starling in a cage looking out from behind the bars onto a flock of its own kind. The Boy felt a twang of something in his heart, a feeling he did not know yet. He suddenly felt the need to open the cage door and set the starling on the windowsill.

"You'll need some clothes." He said after a long pause.

The girl smiled. It was the most beautiful thing the Boy had ever seen.


	8. The First Night

The Girl was new to the streets. Their first night, as soon as they had slipped out of the air ventilation system into the street, she shivered and asked what the man smoking on the side of the gutter was.

She had never seen the outside a day in her life… well, the real outside, that is.

When they found an alleyway empty far enough from the hospital to put up camp, she skittered around puddles and, when she lay down, shuddered at stones under the blanket. But she never said anything that night, she just seemed to have a silent shade of thankfulness over herself despite the skittishness at the new world she had entered. When the Boy woke up in the middle of the night, he could've sworn he heard the faint voice, "And God, thank you for getting me away from papa and finding me this Boy, thank you for setting me free." The Boy had faded back to sleep then.

The Boy woke the next day to the first ray of sun peeking over the apartment building and straight into his eyes. He had to blink twice to get the burn off of them.

Then he sat up and looked over at girl, who had crept over during the night to huddle next to him in the cold night. She was fast asleep.

The Boy set to work packing up his makeshift camp into his pack. He sipped at a milk carton as he waited for the Girl to wake up. He contemplated abandoning her there, leaving her with a few items of food and an extra outfit to fend for herself. If he took her with him, he would have to share all of his food and there would be no way to leave her behind once he took her in all the way. She would be an inhibition to the quick movement he needed to escape authorities and angry shopkeepers and he couldn't waste time defending her from the men and gangs that would sell her for a profit.

But his eleven-year-old intelligence told him that there was something to save of this person. If he left her alone, she would surely be taken and thrown to the wolves. He felt the need to protect her and found no reason in his thinking. Like the night before, he felt the presence of the starling that was too weak to flap its wings from the windowsill. He needed to take it in his hands and show it how to fly.

But it would mean another mouth to feed.

One hour after he had finished the milk and lingered in indecisive thought, her eyes fluttered open. The Boy watched as she opened her eyes completely and stared straight at the bright orange sun showing itself through the long brick-encrusted, dirt-splattered, trash-strewn alleyway as if it were her own personal god.

He heard her whisper something like "beautiful" before coming out of her trance with a start and looking at the Boy as if he had suddenly fabricated out of the wall.

She stared into his eyes, almost surprised that he had stayed. The Boy was surprised he had stayed, too. She stared at the Boy as if waiting for instructions.

If he had been indecisive up to this point, he wasn't any longer.

Acting as a brother would to his younger sister; he gave her a milk carton and began putting the remainder of the camp into his pack.

Soundlessly, she nodded. Within a few seconds, they were walking swiftly down the street in the opposite direction of _Hôpital Henri Gastaut._


	9. The Streets

The Girl remained quiet throughout her stay with the Boy and she only spoke when spoken to, so the Boy only asked the essential questions.

He asked her what her name was and she told him that her name was Alida, meaning "beautifully dressed" as she told him, her lips itching with a slight smile at the irony, as she was dressed in the worst drags a person could believe. But the Boy quickly forgot the name, as he never referred to her with a name, she was the only one he would talk to and she never said her name outside the first time she said it. She didn't call the Boy by his name either, when he refused to tell her his real name, she gave him the name Harvey and told him that it meant "worthy of battle."

They both liked the name but never used it. They became solely the Boy and the Girl. Sometimes "That Girl" and "That Boy", as used by those they had to steal from, bt the noun remained the same.

The Girl and The Boy grew muscles strong enough to punch at a full-grown man and make it hurt. Their dirt-smudged arms and legs grew with their strength until people began avoiding them in the street. Their hair became matted and the Girl began tending to a new sprout of dreadlocks. Later on that year, she chopped them off and let her hair grow out when she found a cockroach living in them. It only took a year for her hair to get to the way it had been when she first set foot on the street.

The Girl was quite good at begging and she had a sharp eye.

In fact, one day the Girl found a ten-euro note on the ground and later got another from a rich man wandering the street with whiskey on his breath. That night, the Boy and Girl celebrated with a whole pie the Boy had been able to steal from an absent-minded baker.

With the Girl, the search for living had become less futile than when the Boy had wandered alone.

The Boy was quite good at stealing and the Girl was good at begging. They shared what they found and were able to pay for what they couldn't steal, such as shoes when their old ones got too small or too worn out to wear or a blanket when theirs got stolen.

They grew and thrived in that fashion for three years, three years of wandering every street they could find until there were no more to roam.

So the boy that was Harvery and the girl that was Alida became the Girl and the Boy.

The Boy and the Girl.

Partners in a kingdom of street filth and companions in a home of ever-changing landscape, stealing and begging for themselves and sharing all else. Friends in a world of enemies.


	10. Preview

_Hey I've been gone for while I know, and I'm far from done with this story, so I thought it would be nice to give you all a preview for one of the next chapters! Once I'm done with this, I have to get back to my summer reading!! Enjoy._

_Well_, he thought, _she _does _think I'm someone else. Why not?_

He leaned in toward her blood-red lips, the smell of hot alcohol burning his nostrils. _Like father smells…_ He tried to get his lips puckered. He felt his youth and inexperience tremble underneath his white skin, his palms burning as if the orange-red armchair were a red-hot flame. He closed his eyelids and watched as a burst of rainbow fluttered beneath them, as pulsing and confusing as his mind felt. He felt dizzy and opened them again.

The whole world felt as if it were in slow motion. The woman's face, caked in cracked makeup, streaks of mascara slipping down her face, penciled-in eyebrows. A false eyelash fell from her eyelid and fell like a leaf in autumn. He suddenly felt a whiplash of resolve as the world returned to real time. A strange voice sounded from the woman's throat, coarse as the cigarette she had been smoking, yet light as the wind, an echo from a forgotten past.

"Vous _m'embrazzerez ou pas?"_ she said, Are you going to kiss me or not?

_OO!! Cliffhanger!! Well I hope I have gotten you interested enough to keep reading and I hope that I can get these essays and questions done soon enough so that I may return._


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